A Day in Benxi

Benxi like Dalian is located in the Liaoning Province of China, Southeast of Shenyang.  Benxi has the longest underground water cave in Asia, which was hollowed out about 5 million years ago.

  As you can see in the above picture the entrance is a huge portal, about 25m wide and 7m high.  Right behind the entrance follows a huge chamber with a pier big enough for 40 boats.  The cave river is really enormous, with an average production of 230 liters per second.  the river is up to 7m deep and the passage is up to 38m and 50m wide.  They also found 3000 year old human remains.

It definitely was one of the best and most interesting places we have gone to thus far.

To learn more about Benxi's Water Cave you can go to http://www.luopan.com/t/en_US/117000L000001.html

Before we go to the water part of the cave, we had to walk through a huge tunnel.  Then they get you on a boat (may we mention the boat was jammed packed like everywhere else in China lol) and it takes about 45 minutes to get to the end of the cave and back.

Inside the cave.

They had it all lit up with different colored lights.

It was a beautiful sight to see.  We felt so lucky to see such a wonder.

Dinosaurs

The Benxi National Park also has Fossilized Tree Trunks.  Very cool!

Surrounding area.  Very beautiful!

Beautiful view, we just had to take a picture.

Just to share with you guys we were planning on spending the night in Benxi but had no luck finding a hotel room.  We made the mistake of traveling on a huge Chinese Holiday, Moon Cake Festival and did not book a room in advance.  We went to 8 hotels looking for rooms at nine o'clock at night.  Some were 5 star hotels and some were NO STAR HOTELS, which by the way, the NO STAR hotels didn't except foreigners.  Which we then later found out that hotels have to obtain a license to service foreigners.  We felt so discriminated ha ha ! :( j/k  We probably didn't want to stay at those places anyway.  We heard horror stories.

So then we had to have our poor driver Tom, drive home for about 5 hours all because we couldn't find a damn hotel.

Moral of the story: assure a bed to sleep before you leave on a trip dumb ass!